Don’t waste your time on the Soaps

I said something like that to a lady at the pool after mentioning that I was following the news from Egypt closely, and she said, “But at least we know the Soaps [soap operas] aren’t real.” Yes, and therefore not something we expend effort praying about.

For the last 12 days I have been glued to the BBC live feed which is covering events in Egypt. That is, I catch up on it multiple times through the day and have read it all. Momentous history in the making. There’s a lot I don’t know and I can’t see the eventual fallout. I pray for justice to prevail.

The last two entries seemed significant:

1415: We’ve received a few of the following: TravellerW tweets: “Word of a Christian mass on Tahrir tomorrow sunday. I’ll be there, too, praying. Will you?”

1410: Ursula Lindsey, writing in the Arabist blog, draws attention to activists held by the secret police: “Many Egyptian human rights activists arrested in the last few days remain in detention… There are probably hundreds if not thousands of others that are also being detained, interrogated and tortured right now. Frightening as the attacks on foreign journalists have been, most of our colleagues have emerged relatively unscathed. It’s the Egyptians being rounded up by police and intelligence that I truly fear for.

Christians need to wake up and pray.

We make a big noise about democracy and freedom of speech in the West. We need to put our prayers where our mouths are.